A bit of boogaloo to start your day, courtesy of Pete Rodriguez.
Jazz
[Music] Charles Mingus – Moanin’
The angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, tearing it up near the end of his prime, in 1993.
Thanks to my friend Barry Braxton, who posts some rather amazing things on a frequent basis.
[Music] Giovanni Guidi Trio – City of Broken Dreams
I trust ECM Records immensely, as their musicians never let me down. Giovanni Guidi continues that streak wonderfully.
[Music] Maria João Jazz Quintet – Take Five
It’s not enough that Take Five by Dave Brubeck is a gorgeous enough song. Add to it the vocal styling of Maria João and her band, and you have a perfect masterpiece to enjoy your martini with.
[Music] Uri Caine/Ksawery Wójciński/Robert Rasz – Plays Wladyslaw Szpilman
A warm thanks to MultiKulti for posting this. Here are their notes (follow them, please!):
Editor’s info:
Uri Caine plays Wladyslaw Szpilman — a special project of Tzadik Poznan Festival 2013
Marek Edelman once said, “Szpilman is the symbol of all those, who survived, since there must have been dozens of unlikely, wondrous circumstances to survive.”The music of this composer and pianist — a student of the Fryderyk Chopin Conservatory in Warsaw under the tutelage of Jozef Smidowicz and Aleksander Michalowski and later the Academy of Arts in Berlin, where he studied under Arthur Schnabel and Leonid Kreutzer (piano) as well as composition under Franz Schreker — is know around the entire world thanks in large part due to Roman Polanski’s movie, The Pianist.
This cultural and artistic project is devoted to the figure and oeuvre of a prominent composer, the creator of classical music and many unforgettable songs that have become permanently ingrained into the cultural history of the 20th century.Uri Caine performed on Tzadik Poznan Festival with Polish musicians Ksawery Wójciński on the double bass and Robert Rasz on the percussion. The musicians together presented authorial interpretations of Szpilman’s compositions.
Uri Caine, one of the great innovators of contemporary music, will pay tribute in this way to the Polish composer and pianist.
[Music] Hagiga Sextet – Green Lizard
The Hagiga Sextet are an Israeli jazz band led by saxophonist Alon Farber, one found during my daily stumble around Facebook’s groups.
[Music] Fats Waller – By the Light of the Silvery Moon (1942)
Masterful romantic music, courtesy of Fats Waller and my niece, who has apparently fallen in love with this track.
[Video] Sevil – Sevil (1971, Azerbaijan, USSR)
Outside of Vagif Mustafa-Zade, who has been featured here before on this blog, there’s not a lot of information on music from Azerbaijan. Sevil is a band who played a type of jazz-funk which was popular throughout the Soviet Bloc. Really solid music.
If any of my friends from the region could point me to some biographical data about the band, I’d be most thankful.
[Video] ABC Ansambl Angela Vlatkovića – Snovi (1975, LP)
One wonders if Blaxploitation soundtracks were big in the Former Yugoslavia. Here’s Serbian bandleader Angelo Vlatković funking out.
[Video] Aleksandar Subota – Watermelon Man (1970, LP)
Aleksandar ‘Saša’ Subota was a jazz musician from Belgrade, Serbia, who was quite a big player in the ex-Yugoslavian jazz scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Here, he does sterling work in covering Herbie Hancock’s 1962 classic.